For Union Beach couple, Sandy damaged more than just things

Jul. 17, 2013

FILE PHOTO - NJ Collier School students help restore a Union Beach home in May

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UNION BEACH — The saltwater kept rolling in off Raritan Bay in 20-foot waves, crashing on the street where Bobby and Pamela Vazquez lived, turning it into a churning rapid.

The wind howled with 80-mph gusts, gas lines burst and hissed, electric lines crackled and people trapped in their homes yelled for help.

As water gushed into their house, Bobby and Pamela ran to the apartment over the garage -- the highest point they could reach -- to ride out the storm. They watched the wind tear the French doors free as water surged through the opening. The walls and roof twisted and crumbled.

Superstorm Sandy had arrived, wiping out sections of their town and communities up and down the 130-mile coastline of the Jersey Shore.

Cars, parts of houses -- including theirs -- and debris slammed into the garage, shaking the apartment with deafening booms.

Then the apartment shimmied and rocked and Pamela, 49, fell as the floor buckled. Bobby looked down from the deck and saw the walls of the garage were gone.

“We gotta jump,” Bobby, 51, told his wife. And with that, they plunged into the roiling water.

Nine months have passed since that evening when Bobby and Pamela Vazquez survived the harrowing experience. Nine months of trying to loosen the vise that the storm has had on every aspect of their lives -- their physical, emotional and mental state, their finances and, ultimately, their future. Nine months of battling depression, uncertainty, loss and guilt.

Their anguish is familiar to anyone who has lived through a natural disaster. For these families, whether they’ve lost homes or livelihood to tornadoes in Oklahoma or explosions in West, Texas, the return to “normal” is a daily struggle that takes months, often years.

As summer welcomes people back to the Jersey Shore, rebuilding has been slow but steady.

Yet the Vazquezes, like thousands of others who lost homes, remain in limbo.

The storm caused $7.8 billion in insured commercial and residential losses in New Jersey. About 82,000 homes sustained damage, according to the state’s Department of Community Affairs. Of those, 56,000 suffered major or severe damage, and of those, a little more than 40,000 were owner-occupied primary residences.

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The Vazquezes have been trying to rebuild their lives with no possessions, limited savings and no permanent place to live. Homeowners insurance did not cover flooding. They were paid nothing.

So they’ve muddled through the past nine months, finding solace at church, through volunteering and by holding their tight-knit family even tighter. Only now has the storm that brought them face-to-face with their own mortality slowly loosened its grip.

WHY THEY STAYED

Pamela and Bobby Vazquez decided to ride out Sandy in their five-bedroom, two-story house across the street from the beach despite a mandatory evacuation. The working-class community of 6,300 people sits across from Staten Island, N.Y.

“We’d had other storms and water came up to the driveway, maybe a little in the garage, and that’s it,” Bobby says. They thought this storm would be no different.

Pamela was watching NCIS on TV. Bobby was puttering in the garage. He had put duct tape on the bottom of the garage door to keep the water out, but a stream was seeping in.

“We weren’t panicking,” Bobby says. “We just put everything higher.”

They ran to the apartment over the garage with their 80-pound Pyrenees dog Molly. They thought they’d be safe. They might even catch a nap.

As dusk approached, the wind picked up, the bay pushed farther into the street and debris began to pummel the garage. Couches, refrigerators and cars floated by. The deck where they stood detached, and they found themselves floating on a fast-moving current, heading straight toward a tree.

When they made that desperate dive into the churning water, Pamela had been holding Molly by the leash, but the dog kept pulling her underwater. She had to let the dog go. “She went one way, we went the other,” Pamela says.

The couple swam, climbed and crawled over wood, trees, furniture, plaster and myriad other debris.

“I kept going under. Saltwater kept going in my mouth,” Pamela says. Bobby kept pulling her up. They were trying to get to a house that was still standing.

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They clambered up the deck to the house, where the owners were also waiting out the storm.

Within an hour, they heard barking. Molly was floating on a piece of wood that was lodged between the driveway of the house they were in and the house next door.

The three had survived. The house didn’t.

BEFORE AND AFTER SANDY

It was a tragic end to a place that had an emotional hold for the couple and their six children. The Vazquezes are a modern-day Brady Bunch. Theirs is a second marriage for both. She had been a divorcee with four children: Cris, 28; Annie, 26; Matthew, 23; and Nicky, 20; he, a widower with two, Brock, 28, and Tina, 25.

They bought the house in 2003 for its space and location at the edge of the bay. They’d walk on the beach when the tide was low, throw parties and barbecues and play volleyball on the sand court they installed. It became the nucleus, the place where the squabbles that came from being a blended family gave way to uniting as one. As the children grew older and had children of their own, it was the place where the grandchildren had their own rooms and spent weekends.

For Bobby and Pamela, the house was also their retirement plan.

Almost immediately after the storm, Bobby began playing that night over and over in his mind. He struggled with feeling guilty that he put his wife of 11 years in harm’s way.

“We made the decision together but I should have done a better job of taking care of my wife,” he says.

A deep depression took hold. The first week after the storm, they stayed with daughter Annie’s boyfriend and his family. Then they moved in with Pamela’s parents for two months.

All Bobby wanted to do was visit the property, which was just a pile of broken planks and sodden debris until December. When that was hauled away, he’d visit the dirt patch that was left. They knew where he’d been when they saw the dirt on his shoes.

At home, he spent much of the time sleeping. The fun-loving dad who teased and told randy jokes was moody and irritable.

A car salesman, he hardly sold any cars -- one month, only five. He’d laugh one minute and cry the next.

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“You never know which Bobby you’ll get,” Pamela said two months after the storm. They never talked about what they were going through. She had a hard time dealing with his moods, but she says she had to let him work through it.

Pamela was struggling, too. She’d been laid off three years before the storm from her job as a steel detailer, someone who made detailed drawings to show construction crews exactly how to erect the steel parts of a building. She battled sleeplessness and migraines that had been under control but were unleashed after the storm.

Then there was the matter of trying to rebuild their house. They were insured for wind damage, not water. The insurance company told them flooding caused the damage and denied their claim.

They had to battle the Federal Emergency Management Agency, too. Pamela’s father bought the house, and it was in his name. The couple paid him a monthly mortgage amount, made repairs and paid the taxes. Because the house was in his name, though, FEMA regarded it as his secondary home and denied them financial assistance.

After three months of wrangling to show they owned the house, FEMA gave them $32,000.

In December, FEMA provided them with a temporary three-bedroom apartment in Fort Monmouth, a closed Army base 30 minutes from Union Beach. They can stay until September.

“It’s just good to have our own place,” Bobby said then.

It was a start.

'MAYOR OF FORT MONMOUTH'

Walk into the apartment on the third floor of the former barracks, and you get a glimpse of how homey the house at 804 Brook Ave. had been.

The first thing you see is a tapestry made from a photo of all six children -- one of the few items saved from the wreckage -- hanging on the wall.

Pictures of the children and three grandchildren and colorful children’s drawings blanket the refrigerator door. A collage of family photos takes up half the living room wall. The apartment is alive with toys.

In a nod to Sandy, a book of photos from the storm sits on the TV stand.

About three months after the storm, Bobby began weekly chats with Carl Williamson, a minister from nearby Homedale who befriended the couple after he went to Union Beach to volunteer with the cleanup and rebuilding.

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“He was getting scared and needed to talk about it,” says Williamson, 32. Over the course of five visits, they talked about faith and spirituality, Bobby’s guilt over that night and the future.

They started a weekly Bible study in the apartment in April. At the beginning of June, Bobby went to church for the first time as a parishioner -- not merely to attend a wedding or funeral, as had been the case.

“It’s brought me peace,” Bobby says.

He also started taking anti-anxiety medication.

The change is visible. He sold 15 cars last month.

“This whole storm changed me a lot,” he says. “I’m softer than I used to be.”

Pamela, too, is finding meaning in their experience. Shortly after Sandy, the couple began volunteering to help fellow residents. Bobby delivered appliances, and Pamela worked at a food pantry.

Since moving to the Army base, Pamela has led food drives for the 35 or so families living there. In June, she went to West, Texas, with Williamson and other volunteers to help families displaced by a fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 and injured hundreds.

She’s become the person that base residents go to with questions, complaints or concerns. She tells the story of a man who came to the apartment late one night because he needed help dealing with his FEMA caseworker.

“He said I’d been hard to get a hold of, like if I had office hours,” she says, laughing. “When did I become the mayor of Fort Monmouth?”

Other good things have come from the storm, they say. They’ve become closer as they’ve navigated each other’s heartaches and frustrations.

“Bobby has always been my strength,” Pamela says. “Even the night of the storm, when I didn’t know if I could go on, he said, ‘Yes, you will.’”

Bobby says Pamela was patient and didn’t let him feel sorry for himself. “I know it was not easy for her seeing me go through this, but she took it like a man,” he says, grinning with a flash of his old lighthearted self.

They still don’t know if they will go home again. They can’t afford to rebuild. They’ve applied for grants from the state and federal government, the Foundation to Save the Jersey Shore, which is a group helping people rebuild, and Habitat for Humanity.

For now, they have settled on a new routine: Every week, they go to a park a block from their house with their 3-year-old granddaughter, Addison. They eat lunch at Jakeabob’s Bay, a waterfront restaurant that was destroyed after the storm and reopened farther inland. They visit with friends and neighbors.

“It’s the little taste of home we get now,” Bobby says.

For the first time in nine months, they can start to plan what’s next. They can even begin to imagine what the new house might look like if they get the grants they need.

“For the first time, I’m done with the storm,” Bobby says. He looks at Pamela, who nods. “The storm is over, and I’m ready to move on.”

As if to prove it, the couple was baptized last month in the bay across the street from their house, a new start in the very waters where they almost met their end.